Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, and the author of American Judaism: A History.
Jonathan Sarna
By Jonathan Sarna
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Culture The passing of pioneering historian Moses Rischin marks the end of an era
Moses Rischin, the last survivor among the bold group of scholars who created the field of American Jewish history following World War II, died last week in San Francisco at the age of 94. His passing marks the end of an era. Prior to World War II, most of those who wrote American Jewish history…
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Opinion Why The Rush To Tear Down Grant’s Tomb Is Ignorant
As Confederate monuments tumble across the United States, it comes as no surprise that other longstanding monuments now face closer scrutiny. On Tuesday, a Jewish organization named Shurat Hadin called for the removal of statues to New Amsterdam’s disabled governor, Peter Stuyvesant, on the grounds that he was “an extreme racist who targeted Jews and…
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News Alan Mintz Led An Academic Movement — And Changed Judaism For Good
A colleague burst into my office in Jerusalem on Sunday morning with the shocking news: “Did you hear that Alan Mintz died last night in New York?” I had to ask her to repeat what she had said. “Are you sure?” I stammered. “I just heard the news from one of his friends,” she replied….
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Opinion 100 Years Later, Has Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court Nomination Changed Anything?
“Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew nominated by President Wilson to the Supreme Court of the United States,” the “magic bulletin board” outside the Forward building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan announced in Yiddish on Friday, January 28, 1916. “God be blest!” an onlooker quoted by the New-York Tribune responded. “In Russia we…
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Opinion Is ‘Open Orthodoxy’ an Oxymoron?
This past year saw the inaugural graduation in June of Yeshivat Maharat, the Bronx yeshiva that has been controversially training women to lead Orthodox congregations. Three new maharats emerged from the school this year. Then in the fall came the high profile installation of Rabbi Asher Lopatin as the new president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah,…
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Opinion Why Is Orthodoxy Packing Up Big Tent?
Readers of Israel’s Haaretz.com, many of them liberal and secular, must have been surprised to read, in late October, a public manifesto, signed by 42 members of the Rabbinical Council of America castigating “Open Orthodox rabbis and leaders” in the United States. The signatories — none of them, it should be noted, an officer of…
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Opinion The Jewish Translation That Rewrote the Bible
“The Catholics have done it; the Protestants have done it; AND NOW THE JEWS ARE GOING TO DO IT!” So began a 1956 solicitation letter for, of all things, a new Jewish translation of the Bible. Fifty years have now passed since the first part of that translation, “The Torah: The Five Books of Moses,”…
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Opinion Rabbis Have Long Had Place at Conventions
“The prayer at the convention was offered by a Jewish rabbi,” The New York Times reported in an article headlined “Why a Rabbi was Chosen.” The reference was to neither Meir Soloveichik nor David Wolpe, who delivered invocations at this year’s Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Instead, the reference was to Samuel Sale of St….
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